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Nearly 30 million battle diabetes and every 23 seconds someone new is diagnosed. Diabetes causes more deaths a year than breast cancer and AIDS combined. Your gift today will help us get closer to curing diabetes and better treatments for those living with diabetes.

Get In Touch With Your Appetite

There are many signals that tell us it's time to eat (other than a rumbling stomach): television ads, social events, smells from the food court, and the candy bowl at the office. These factors in the environment trigger our senses and other mental processes that make us think we are hungry even when we’re not.

Remember that physical hunger builds gradually over time (usually over several hours after a meal), whereas emotional eating and cravings usually come on very suddenly. When you are genuinely hungry, you may experience one or several of the symptoms listed below:

Stomach pangs or growling

Emptiness in the stomach

Irritability

Headache

Low energy/fatigue

Difficulty concentrating

How Does the Scale Work?

Before you eat, take a moment to rate your hunger. Think about how hungry you physically feel. Your goal is to eat between levels 4 and 6. This means you are eating when you are hungry but stopping when you are comfortably full.

Try not to put off eating for too long. Waiting until level 1 or 2 — when you are starving and unable to concentrate — may lead to overeating. When you first start to feel any of the symptoms listed above, you should probably start to think about eating.

We often let the sight of food tempt us when we are above a level 6 on the scale. Before you indulge, take a step back and think about how you feel. Did you just eat a few minutes ago? Are you eating in response to an emotion or because you are experiencing physical hunger?

Think of alternatives to eating for when these temptations arise. Some ideas are:

Drink a glass of cold water or another zero-calorie beverage

Take a walk to change the scenery

Do another form of exercise (sit-ups, running, swimming, tennis, etc.)